And so incomprehensible as well. So even if they are yelling at you, it doesn’t feel so bad because you have no clue what is being said.
I knew it! I knew he secretly wanted to watch the royal wedding. Me thinks he protested too much, what with all that talk about lizard people from beyond the moon. Get a grip dude, everyone who has a brain knows the lizard people live under the Earth’s surface.
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Unfortunately French, Duch, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Russians and even Belgians did their best to parallel and in many cases surpass British colonial legacy.
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It’s the Scottish [street tough?] accent and syntax that throw me. One example; ‘Archie’ (a then young, Ewen Bremmer!) saying to ‘Johnny’ in Mike Leigh’s excellent Naked (1993):
“Giz one!” (Translation of demand for a cigarette: “Give me one!”)
wait what?
I understand it just fine thank you very much, I don’t think that’s what knoxblox was getting at since he is American.
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“Up the RA!” - a fervent expression of ultra-nationalism, generally used tongue-in-cheek. US equivalent would be yelling " 'Murica!"
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Things weren’t to spiffy in England while Cromwell was in power, either. While on route to Bristol his troops took a detour to a tiny hamlet called Slaughterford in order to completely trash the lovely little church, it took the Victorians to restore it. Very tastefully, too. And then there was the Civil War…
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Yeah, I think my joke was taken too seriously, much like a British royal wedding. If we’re ever going to acheive true “wokeness”, people need to stop fawning over shit like this.
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Cromwell and his Puritans did all sorts of nastiness. Pulled down a 12th-century cross a prior king had set up in memory of his wife because they considered crosses idolatrous. Closed down theatres, even declared walking for pleasure sinful. Very much a Christian version of the Taliban. I think by 1660 there was hardly a republican left in England.
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I dunno. I personally don’t care and didn’t watch the wedding, but the Royals are a part of British cultural tradition. Many Brits are republicans (in the classic sense) and I sure as hell would be if I were a British citizen. But I’m not going to tell another culture they need to ditch a relatively harmless powerless anachronism to be a better society. On the list of stuff that needs changing in Britain, ditching the Royal family is way down the list of priorities.
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It didn’t help that any republican group which was opposed to Cromwell tended to have it’s leaders imprisoned or executed.
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Someone is clear taking the piss here.
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Lizzy is still the world’s largest landholder. 6.6 billion acres.
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Are the Crown assets the personal private property of the royal family, or do they belong to government departments? My very possibly wrong understanding is that bulk of the monarchy’s insane wealth belongs to trusts that the royal family would lose any right to if they either abdicated or in the unlikely event that they were removed from their role as figureheads by the elected government.
Mind you, I get your deeper point that it’s obscene to maintain so much wealth, even if only as a legal fiction, in the hands of a single extended family, when many Britons can’t even afford rent. I agree it’s a symbol of aristocratic greed, even if it’s only a symbol.
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“He’s teabagging my tea!”
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As I understand it, the Crown Estates belong to the Crown, which is not the same thing as the monarch. Like many British institutions, the Crown is (probably deliberately) nebulously defined, but seems to be in some way both an office of state and the state itself (l’état, c’est moi, but more discreetly expressed).
In any event, despite what various annoying royalists assert when they want to convince you what good value the monarchy is,* the Crown Estates are not the monarch’s personal property, as evidenced by the fact that Edward VIII did not get to keep them when he abdicated. Contrast with Sandringham and Balmoral, which were purchased privately by his great-grandparents, which he inherited from his father, and which following his abdication he sold for a tidy sum to George VI, which is how Brenda comes to own them today.
To muddy the waters further, there’s also the Duchy of Lancaster, which supposedly is a private estate held in trust for the monarch, and the income from which provides the Privy Purse (Brenda’s other major source of income besides the Sovereign Grant, formerly the Civil List), but the capital of which the monarch can’t touch, pass on in his/her will or otherwise alienate.
All of this is in the end morally moot, as the thieving bastards stole it all in the first place.
* The argument usually compares the income from the Crown Estates with the percentage given back to the Queen (currently 25%, I think), and tries to make out that the remaining 75% is money we wouldn’t otherwise have, and so the monarchy “pays for itself” and then some. What they mysteriously always fail to mention is that when George III got this system started way back when, he agreed to hand over the revenues from the Crown Estates to Parliament not only in return for an annual grant but also for Parliament picking up the expenses of government that the King had previously paid for. Financially it was pretty much a wash, and was only necessary because the King was so bad at running his estates that expenses were outstripping income.
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